Russell Krajec

I received a free copy of this, despite the author -- a patent attorney of my acquaintance -- knowing I am a fairly firm opponent of the state of patent law in general, and software patents (which likely represent a significant part of his business) in particular. Needless to say, we do not see eye-to-eye on the matter of patents, but the book deserves a balanced review.

Highly informative, viewing the matter of patents from an interesting and fairly original perspective, Investing In Patents provides excellent guidance for the strictly financially-oriented business investor.

It suffers a bit from need of more careful editing, including for greater clarity in some cases in the midst of what is otherwise a very straightforward, lucid treatment of an often complicated and opaque subject. As an acquaintance of the author, I'm half inclined to offer my editing services for a second edition; I like him, and I found the book informative, even if I dislike many of the implications of practical consideration of patents as investment value.

There were some minor points in the book where things could have been organized slightly differently to reduce repetition of concepts without hurting clarity. In a couple cases, it might even have improved it.

My biggest disappointment, of course, was the obvious ethics-bias I have come to expect from lawyers in general with regard to their fields of expertise. I do admire the BlueIron IP business model's obvious benefits for small startups, as opposed to merely serving the interests of industry dominators whose status as "practicing entities" (business organizations that actually make use of "inventions", instead of just collecting patents for rent-seeking behavior) is not much more than nominal. Despite that, much of the investment value discussion in the book is still focused on exactly the same kind of predatory patent valuation and leverage strategies such industry dominators would employ, essentially teaching startups and their investors to seek success by shutting competitors out of markets more than by outcompeting.

Legal expertise, in my observation, tends to bias the expert toward regarding "legal ethics" standards as at least equivalent, probably equal, and possibly superior to more universal standards. Russ Krajec is rare in his tendency to note the conflicts of interest that arise from the byzantine twists and turns of legal and business ethics standards and find a way to extract a more universalizable ethical principle -- then actually act on it. Despite this rare quality, he still appears to run afoul of those common ethics bias failings, based on my reading of this book.

By contrast, having read through this book with an eye toward my interest areas of ethical theory and economics, as well as legal and business strategies, I only find that many of the examples of how to make the best of the patent system presented in Investing In Patents essentially consist of justification of strategies by success, of means by ends, and of tactics by professional standards committees. In short, I find much to disappoint me in the realm of the (mostly implicit, when it happens at all) treatment of the ethics of business patent strategies, but much of value in the information to be gleaned from this otherwise well-conceived book.… (meer)